I’m gonna do you all a favor here and give you a warning. And trust me, it’s a warning that you all probably want to heed (yeah, I totally just used the word “heed’ in a sentence, and I did it the right way too, which I know because I googled it afterwards just to make sure, you know, so I wouldn’t look like an idiot or anything, because I can’t have myself looking like an idiot. Although on second thought I think it actually behooves me to look like an idiot. See what I just did there? I totally rocked some “behooved.” Suck on that, douchebag English professor who gave me a “C” even though I kicked butt in that class, because you didn’t like me and not because I deserved it. I haven’t forgotten you).

Anyway, back to my really important and completely accurate warning: You can’t trust the Ford family with your children.

Last weekend The Hub was out of town, as was my friend Stephanie’s husband, and since she was gonna have a really early day on Saturday, I was keeping her two kids here overnight. We all had dinner together first, during which Stephanie kept commenting on how much her son, Timmy, was eating. Then she told me how much he had consumed that day, saying that it was an unusually large amount of food. Now, that stuff I just told you there? That is called foreshadowing. You know, like when you’re watching a horror movie and one of the characters is fixing a nice dinner and chatting with her friends and then they show a close-up of her chopping a carrot in half with a big knife or something, and you know that later in the movie some psycho murderer is gonna break into her house and use that same knife to stab her to death? That is foreshadowing (and again, suck on that professor).

So everything was going fine that night until I was awakened from a deep REM sleep at 11:30 PM by an unpleasant trio of voices: One screaming bloody murder, one yelling my name, and one doing some sort of crying/wailing thing. Well, it took me a minute to realize that I wasn’t dreaming these sounds, and then another minute to remember where I put my pants because I didn’t know if it was appropriate to run out there in my underwear when someone else’s kids were present, but then I realized that maybe giving someone their children back alive was more important than whether or not they saw me in my undies. So I ran out to the living room fully expecting to see a murderer, a ghost, an alien, or possibly even a zombie in the midst of a full-on kid attack, but what I actually saw was Timmy and his sister coming down my stairway in slow motion while The Boy stood up in the game room screaming, then Timmy stopping to sit on a stair about halfway down and proceed to blow chunks all over the steps below him. At this point I ran to the kitchen to get something for him to use as a receptacle besides my carpet, but unfortunately I didn’t make it back in time before he did it again. So then Timmy, who actually could have passed for a zombie at that moment, got up and made his way to the living room where he laid down on the carpet, and I said “Timmy, I love you but I’m just gonna scoot you over onto the tile,” because my carpet just couldn’t take any more.

When I got my wits about me and was able to stop thinking about whether or not this incident could mean that possibly Timmy was bitten by a zombie and was going through the zombie “change,” I grabbed the phone to call Stephanie and tell her that her kid was single-handedly destroying my home and was probably gonna be a full-blown zombie in less than 5 minutes, but for some reason (probably due to inhalation of vomit gases that are not from your own kid) I dialed the number of a different friend and woke her up in the middle of the night and went round and round for a minute before I understood that I had the wrong number. Then I started over and got Stephanie on the line and told her that Timmy was barfing, which took her a few minutes to fully comprehend, because she went to bed at 8:00 and was in even deeper REM sleep than I was. So she finally understands the situation and gets her ass over here and gets the kids, all of their gear, and a barf bag and heads home for a night of fun, fun, fun. At this point, The Boy is still in the game room refusing to come out because he doesn’t want to see any barf, so I go up and take him to his bedroom and he refuses to sleep in there because “I can’t forget what happened up here,” so I tell him to close his eyes while I lead him down the steps so he can sleep in my bed, and I get him tucked in and get out the towels, rags and buckets I need I order to start cleaning up the stair case. And although I consider calling my housekeeper and offering her big bucks to drive over here and clean it up for me, I decide that she might not appreciate that, so I just hold my breath and do it myself, then stay up for a few hours watching tv and drinking a big honkin’ glass of wine until I can forget about the whole experience and fall asleep.

Fast forward 1 week: The Hub is home. He decides to take The Boy and our neighbor, Taylor, to the playground. When he gets back he tells me that Taylor hurt herself on the Monkey Bars:

Me: “Was she okay?”

Steve: “Well, I could tell she was trying not to cry, so we left. She cried a little bit in the back seat.”

Me: “Did you walk her next door?”

Steve: “No.”

Me: “Did you call Lisa and tell her what happened?”

Steve: “No. I think she was fine.”

Next morning. I’ve been up for an hour. The Hub wakes up and enters the living room:

Me: “Hey honey…come here. There’s a picture on Facebook I want you to see.”

Yep…that’s a broken arm.

Of course The Hub felt terrible, and I posted an apology on Lisa’s FB page for my husband being such a doink. Then she called me and told me about their trip to the ER. I told her that as an apology I was going to bring our new cat over with a big bow on her and give her to Taylor, and Lisa pretty much told me she would kill me if I did that, but her husband yelled that I could make them some of my pineapple cake if I wanted to make things right. So that’s what I did. I made them a pineapple cake and gave them a nice card:

If you leave your kid with us, we’ll probably totally eff them up, but we will give you pineapple cake and a card to make up for it. Cuz that’s how we roll.

I had her the first half of the day and must have said 5 or 6 times- Stop doing that, you CANNOT break your arm on my watch! When I saw the news I so totally thought it was my fault. So we will share the responsibility-Because it was so close to being my fault (don’t tell Lisa). xo

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